Broadband Reports points us to the latest in silly arguments over non-existent "theft." This time it's about whether or not tethering your smartphone and using it as a hotspot or as a broadband connection for your computer/laptop is "theft of service." Two ZDNet bloggers go at it, with James Kendrick insisting that it's "theft of service," and no arguments to the contrary will persuade him. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols points out that this is complete "nonsense." In the interest of full disclosure, I'll point out that I do pay for the right to tether my mobile phone, even though I agree with Vaughan-Nichols and think Kendrick is wrong here.
If a bandwidth provider is selling you bandwidth at a particular rate, it's none of that provider's business what you then do with the bandwidth. Claiming that only certain devices can use it is silly. We had this back in the early days of WiFi when some ISPs insisted it was a terms of service violation to use WiFi or (in some cases) any router that allowed more than one computer to use the bandwidth. However, as more and more people just started doing it anyway, the ISPs all realized they were fighting a silly battle (and moved on to the next silly battle: "net neutrality.")
But, really, the ridiculous claim is Kendrick's insistence on calling people who do this "thieves," even though they're paying customers who are paying for the bandwidth they use. Vaughan-Nichols properly points out that, at worst, it's a terms of service violation that has absolutely nothing to do with "theft." He also points out that he's paying for the bandwidth: I don't see why it matters if I use gigabytes of data on my phone or on my phone and laptop. At the end of the day, I still pay for it.
To me a data service is lot like my water line. I pay for what I use. Now I can drink that water, use it on my phone; wash clothes with it, use it on my PC; or shower with it, use it on my iPod Touch. Whatever. When all is said and done, I've still paid for the water or service and I've not stolen anything.
No, the real problem here isn't users. It's the carriers who charge us extra for the 'privilege' of deciding how we're going to use the data/water we receive from them. Kendrick's response appears to be to just keep repeating that it's "theft of service," but can't back that up by explaining what's missing. That's because nothing is missing. It's not theft of service in any way, shape or form, and it does Kendrick a disservice to his usually excellent analysis to beat this particularly misguided drum.
Obviously it isn't. I think this is one of those rare cases where a lobotomy would make him smarter.
I'm actually sympathetic to the wireless companies, here.
It's a closed system -- you have hardware X that you're paying to have put on their network, and it's in the contract. They budget and price bandwidth based on the capabilities of the hardware -- you're not going to be bit-torrenting seasons 1-5 of ST:TNG on your phone.
Tethering throws those calculations off, and raises the congestion (and subsequent price) of bandwidth for everybody else on the network if you're doing it outside the terms of your contract.
Do you bring in your 6-gallon Gatorade keg on Saturday mornings to fill up with Hi-C for your son's soccer team after paying $1.29 for a small soft drink with free refills at McDonalds?
If you did, do you believe the establishment has the right to deny you service and eject you from the premises?
_________________ "Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee "... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
I think the issue is that bandwidth availability over wireless is increasing so much that they can't keep pace with their monetary models.
I.e., in an ideal system they shouldn't lose revenues because people only want a cell plan and not landline cable as well. Rather the new technology should be making them more money.
Tethering is not theft. I pay for the goddamn bandwidth, its my business how I use it.
**** you and your models. If your network can't handle it, that's a problem with your network.
This, additionally... Why would they market the phone I have as "capable of being a wifi hotspot" if it was theft?
Every time I talk to Sprint they ask me if I want to buy the silly little USB device that allows me to use my cell phone service as an internet connection. I always tell them the same thing, "no thanks, if I wanted to use my cell phone service for an internet connection... I would just use that feature on my phone."
to which they always say, "oh yeah good point."
If it were theft, I think that talking to the rep on the phone and telling him what I would do if I wanted a crappy internet connection would probably have had consequences already.
Do not want people to use that feature... do not offer it.
in fact... this is right off of the Sprint site for my phone:
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 9:11 am Posts: 9449 Location: Your Dreams
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
I'm actually sympathetic to the wireless companies, here.
It's a closed system -- you have hardware X that you're paying to have put on their network, and it's in the contract. They budget and price bandwidth based on the capabilities of the hardware -- you're not going to be bit-torrenting seasons 1-5 of ST:TNG on your phone.
Tethering throws those calculations off, and raises the congestion (and subsequent price) of bandwidth for everybody else on the network if you're doing it outside the terms of your contract.
Do you bring in your 6-gallon Gatorade keg on Saturday mornings to fill up with Hi-C for your son's soccer team after paying $1.29 for a small soft drink with free refills at McDonalds?
If you did, do you believe the establishment has the right to deny you service and eject you from the premises?
I don't understand this. If you pay for 6 GB a month of data service, how does it matter what you use it for? How does tethering your laptop to the phone and running a torrent raise the congestion and price of your bandwidth any more than any other method of using your 6 GB of data? If you opt for a cheaper plan (say, 500 MB), you're not going to have enough available bandwidth to tether for very long. You pay for a certain amount of bandwidth over a month's time. If you go over that amount, you either pay more, or have your service suspended. What's the difference how you use it?
_________________ Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails... ...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be? Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me █ ♣ █
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2010 11:59 am Posts: 3879 Location: 63368
It's not stealing if you pay for it. If you don't, then yes, it is.
If you want to pasture a horse in my field and pay me, that's all good, but that doesn't mean you can pasture 2 for the price of 1.
I don't care if you tell me that they're only going to eat 1 horses worth of grass between them, or that I have plenty of grass in my field and all the horses together couldn't eat it all, that's irrelevant.
You need to cough up the cash or stick to the original agreement you made, or don't make the agreement.
If they charged you for tethering and you didn't tether, you'd freak and pitch a fit. That should tell you something.
Perhaps I should clarify. I made the post I made under the assumption that the question in.. question.. was discussing "unlimited" data plans where tethering was not allowed in the contract because it's an optional feature for an additional charge.
You know, situations where the wireless provider would consider it stealing.
If the plan was metered, I'm with Taly -- a GB is a GB.
If the contract permits tethering, as apparently DS's does, then this is a non-issue.
_________________ "Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee "... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
Background [spoiler'ed because it's only him establishing his street cred]
Spoiler:
I don't believe that I need to introduce myself, but if I do my name is P3Droid. I am a phone enthusiast and have been working in the Android platform for 17 months. I have been very lucky in my short time on the Android platform. I think more than anything I have been lucky enough to be in the right places at the right times. The day I first saw and played with the Droid (OG) I thought “that is the ugliest damn phone I've ever played with”. Then I was asked back into the store by my friend (nameless) to get some time with the Android platform and he began to explain to me how open the phone was and how a “smart” person could do anything they wanted to the phone. That turned what I thought was an ugly phone into the sexiest beast ever. I guess that was approximately October of 2009, and I was excited about the possibilities and dove right in without checking the depth of the water.
I spent much of the year on an open phone and an open platform, and sometime in July I picked up a Droid X. I soon found a great bunch of friends and we formed Team Black Hat. Really wanting to break the bootloader, we spent more hours working on it than we did our 9 – 5 jobs. Eventually we came to the conclusion (with help from some unique resources), that we were not going to accomplish our objective. Every so often we still pluck away at it, but we have moved on to other things that will help people enjoy their Droid phones.
Fast forward to October 2010. I'm still in love with the concept of android, and I've done more than my share of developing, themeing, creating ROMS and even hacking. *Having been involved in so many things and having developed some unique contacts, I have been privy to information that is not disseminated to the masses. Some of this information I was asked to sit on. Some information I sat on because I felt it was best to do so for our entire community. You have probably seen me rant on occasion about what I thought the community was doing wrong and causing itself future pain. Each of those days I had received even more disheartening information. So where does this leave me? It leaves me with a difficult choice to make. What to tell, how much to tell, and do I want to give information out that could possible be slightly wrong. I've worked very hard to verify things through multiple sources, when possible, and some other information comes from sources so reliable that I take them at their word.
This brings me up to today. I've tossed and turned regarding how to say this, and how to express all of the information and my feelings in regards to this information. I guess the solution is to just let you all decide for yourselves what you think and what you want to do.
One Shoe Falls
Beginning in July, we (TBH), began hearing things about Motorola working on ways to make rooting the device more difficult. This was going to be done via Google through the kernel. No big deal we thought, the community always finds a way. When Froyo was released and there was no root for some time we became a bit concerned but soon there was a process and even 1-clicks. This was good news and bad news to me, because it simply meant that they would go back to the drawing board and improve upon what they had done.
During this time there were still little rumors here and there about security of devices, and other such things but nothing solid and concrete. Until November.
The Other Shoe Falls
Beginning in October, the information began coming in faster and it had more of a dire ring to it. It was also coming in from multiple sources. I began to rant a little at the state of our community, and that we were the cause of our own woes. So what did I hear?
1. New devices would present challenges for the community that would most likely be insurmountable, and that Motorola specifically – would be impossible to hack the bootloader. Considering we never hacked the previous 3G phones, this was less than encouraging. 2.Locked bootloaders, and phones were not a Motorola-only issue, that the major manufacturers and carriers had agreed this was the best course of action.(see new HTC devices) 3. The driving forces for device lock down was theft of service by rooted users, the return of non-defective devices due to consumer fraud, and the use of non-approved firmware on the networks. I think I posted my first angry message and tweet about being a responsible community soon after getting this information. I knew the hand writing was on the wall, and we would not be able to stop what was coming, but maybe we could convince them we were not all thieves and cut throats.
Moving along, December marked a low point for me. The information started to firm up, and I was able to verify it through multiple channels. This information made the previous information look like a day in the park. So what was new?
1. Multiple carriers were working collaboratively on a program that would be able to identify rooted users and create a database of their meids. 2. Manufacturers who supply Verizon were baking into the roms new security features:
a. one security feature would identify any phone using a tether program to circumvent paying for tethering services. (check your gingerbread DroidX/Droid2 people and try wireless tether) b. a second security feature would allow the phone to identify itself to the network if rooted. c. security item number 2 would be used to track, throttle, even possibly restrict full data usage of these rooted phones.
The Rubber Meets the Road
So, I wish I had more time to have added this to the original post, but writing something like this takes a lot of time and effort to put all the information into context and provide some form of linear progression.
Lets get on with the story. March of this year was a monumental month for me. The information was unsettling and I felt as if we had a gigantic bulls-eye on our backs.
This is what I have heard:
1. The way that they were able to track rooted users is based on pushing updates to phones, and then tracking which meid's did not take the update. There is more to it than this but that is the simple version. 2. More than one major carrier besides Verizon has implemented this program and that all carriers involved had begun tracking rooted phones. All carriers involved were more than pleased with the accuracy of the program.
1. What I was not told is what the carriers intended to do with this information.
3. In new builds the tracking would be built into the firmware and that if a person removed the tracking from the firmware then the phone would not be verified on the network (i.e. your phone could not make phone calls or access data). 4. Google is working with carriers and manufacturers to secure phones, and although Google is not working to end hacking, it is working to secure the kernel so that no future applications can maliciously use exploits to steal end-user information. But in order to gain this level of security this may mean limited chances to root the device. (This item I've been told but not yet able to verify through multiple sources – so take it for what you want) 5. Verizon has successfully used its new programs to throttle data on test devices in accordance with the guidelines of the program. 6. The push is to lock down the devices as tight as can be, but also offer un-lockable devices (Think Nexus S).
The question I've asked is why? Why do all this; why go through so much trouble. The answer I get is a very logical one and one I understand even if I don't like it. It is about the money. With LTE arriving and the higher charges for data and tethering, carriers feel they must bottle up the ability of users to root their device and access this data, circumventing the expensive tethering charges.
What I would like to leave you with is that this is not an initiative unique to Verizon or Motorola, this is industry wide and encompassing many manufacturers.
So what does all this mean? You will need to make your own conjectures about what to think of all of this. But, I think that the rooting, hacking, and modding community - as we know it - is living on borrowed time.
In the final analysis of all this I guess I'll leave you with my feelings:
I will take what comes and turn it into a better brighter day, that is all I can do because I do not control the world.
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 9:11 am Posts: 9449 Location: Your Dreams
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Perhaps I should clarify. I made the post I made under the assumption that the question in.. question.. was discussing "unlimited" data plans where tethering was not allowed in the contract because it's an optional feature for an additional charge.
You know, situations where the wireless provider would consider it stealing.
If the plan was metered, I'm with Taly -- a GB is a GB.
If the contract permits tethering, as apparently DS's does, then this is a non-issue.
I've never seen an unlimited data plan, they don't exist in Canada to my knowledge. They still try to call tethering without paying extra for it "stealing."
_________________ Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails... ...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be? Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me █ ♣ █
Well, I agree with you, in that context, they're being petty and stupid.
As of 12 months ago, I know 2, maybe 3 national carriers offered unlimited plans in the US. If my memory serves, AT&T stopped, but has grandfathered old unlimited for the time being. I know Sprint has recently started an advertising campaign centered around being the only "national" carrier to offer real unlimited. I'm assuming TMO is considered, in the fine print legalese disclaimers for that campaign, to not be among those considered "national," as it's still (until AT&T buys it, at least) offering unlimited.
_________________ "Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee "... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 3:08 am Posts: 6465 Location: The Lab
(I haven't read all of this thread.. i'll try to catch up later)
I'm a little hesitant to participate in the conversation because of the nature of my work, and the strict rules that apply to what I can say publically....
I'm making this post from the perspective of a geeky gadget nerd who loves to tweak and hack and squeeze the most of out his toys, just like many others here. But I also have a unique perspective into some details that most people haven't and will never see. I can't share any details with you at the risk of losing my job, so you'll just have to accept what I'm saying (or not).
I've seen the numbers. The bandwidth consumed by a *VERY* small percentage of the mobile data users exceeds that of all others combined. These are the people who are (for example) using their phones as their primary Internet connection at home and streaming netflix in high resolution to their big screen TV's over the connection, possibly to multiple displays.
I might take a moment to point out that there are handsets out there that tether that do not require any hacking or rooting, etc... (primarily the "Nexus" series from Google (Nexus One and Nexus S). This is because they run Native Android and have not had custom manufucturer UI's built into them. Tethering is a 'feature' of Android that the handset manufactuers usually remove, at the behest of the service providers...
What is called an 'unlimited' data package serves almost all mobile broadband users just fine. All the web browsing, gps, facebook and twitter updates your can handle, within the limitations of your 2" screen.
(Note that I COMPLETELY agree with those who say, if it's NOT unlimited, stop calling it unlimited... but you'll have to take that up with the Marketing people... See my "All You Can Eat Buffet" analogy below)
Technology exists now, and will soon be 'in play' (if it's not already) that will allow providers to differentiate your tethering traffic from that that originates from your phone on the network. No amount of hacking or rooting is going to prevent this. It's just a matter of time before the providers start charging you extra for it. Sorry....
The victims will be the small-time tetherers, who just want to tether their iPod/iPad to check email, or download a quick song, or someone with a netbook who needs to write a quick email at the airport (just examples). They will be forced to pay extra for the tethering service despite the fact that they are not using a significant chunk of bandwidth...
If you want to blame someone, blame those netflix streamers (for example). For a possibly really bad analogy, it's the equivelant of someone backing an 18 wheeler up to the All You Can Eat Buffet, and not leaving much behind for the people just carrying one plate...
Unfortunately, charging extra for tethering is necessary... I don't like it either, but that's just the way it is. Your terms of service for your "Unlimited" data package probably already has this in the fine print. If it doesn't, it will soon.
Joined: Thu Sep 03, 2009 9:11 am Posts: 9449 Location: Your Dreams
It's not like there's any shortage of bandwidth right now, though.
Anyway, this will soon be moot. There have been bittorrent apps for Android for two years. Connecting terrabyte data-storage capacities to phones won't be all that hard, either. If ISPs don't want to offer unlimited bandwidth, differentiating the source of a tethered device from the phone itself won't help.
_________________ Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails... ...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be? Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me █ ♣ █
Let it also be said... Sprint recently started charging an extra 10 bucks per month per new smartphone on your account.
So because I had my Optimus before Feb 28, no charge... but since we added on Lisa's Android right after that.... she gets charged, and if I ever swap my phone, I will get charged as well.
The reason is because Smartphones take more bandwidth than they expected when they released the unlimited data plans.
They also charge extra per month for the tethering service... in summation: my sack.... they can play with it roughly with their tongues... I do not abuse the tethering capability (no need), but I have no sympathy for the bandwidth they lose to those who do.
_________________ Darksiege Traveller, Calé, Whisperer Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut
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